Post navigation

In defense of Mac McClelland (And the view from where I’m standing)

The indignant responses to Mac McClelland’s personal essay in GOOD about how she used consensual, violent sex to ease the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder she developed while reporting on sexual violence in Haiti are extreme examples of the limiting, self-defeating call-out culture in both journalism and American feminism.

That 36 well-respected women working as journalists, aid workers and researchers deemed it necessary to endorse a letter that shames a reporter grappling with PTSD for things she did not even write is evidence of just how widespread support for self-censorship is among a network that, were it to live up to its ideals, would encourage bold self-expression, but instead mobilizes to stamp it out and sow fear of independent thought. As Jill at Feministe put it in a piece about calling-out in the feminist blogosphere: “We have increasingly focused on shutting down voices rather than raising each other up.”

As female journalists and researchers who have lived and worked in Haiti, we write to you today to express our concern with Mac McClelland’s portrayal of Haiti in “I’m Gonna Need You to Fight Me On This: How Violent Sex Helped Ease my PTSD.”

We respect the heart of Ms. McClelland’s story, which is her experience of trauma and how she found sexuality a profound means of dealing with it. Her article calls much needed attention to the complexity of rape. But we believe the way she uses Haiti as a backdrop for this narrative is sensationalist and irresponsible.

The issue here is that McClelland re-tells the story of the gruesome aftermath of the rape of a Haitian woman, an aftermath McClelland herself witnessed, at the beginning of her piece. But she doesn’t bring up the story to make her piece more shocking –she brings it up because it was the event that set her on a collision course with PTSD. In other words, without telling that story, the rest of the essay wouldn’t make sense. It is a deeply disturbing, completely necessary part of McClelland’s narrative of her own trauma.

Between the 36 of us, we have lived or worked in Haiti for many years, reporting on and researching the country both long before and after the earthquake. We each have spent countless hours in the camps and neighborhoods speaking with ordinary Haitians about their experiences coping with the disaster and its aftermath.

We feel compelled to intervene collectively in this instance because, while speaking of her own personal experience, Ms. McClelland also implies that she is speaking up for female “journalists who put themselves in threatening situations all the time,” women who have “chosen to be around trauma for a living,” who she says “rarely talk about the impact.”

In writing about a country filled with guns, “ugly chaos” and “gang-raping monsters who prowl the flimsy encampments,” she paints Haiti as a heart-of-darkness dystopia, which serves only to highlight her own personal bravery for having gone there in the first place. She makes use of stereotypes about Haiti that would be better left in an earlier century: the savage men consumed by their own lust, the omnipresent violence and chaos, the danger encoded in a black republic’s DNA.

Nowhere in McClelland’s piece are the terms “heart-of-darkness dystopia,” “savage men consumed by their own lust,” or “danger encoded in a black republic’s DNA” used. And since when is it verboten to call men who gang rape homeless women “monsters”?

Sadly, these damaging stereotypes about the country are not uncommon. But we were disturbed to find them articulated in Ms. McClelland’s piece without larger context, especially considering her reputation for socially conscious reporting.

McClelland’s piece for GOOD is not a scholarly article about Haitian history. It is not even a reporting piece about Haiti today. It is a personal essay about one reporter’s literally physical battle with her psychological demons. (How difficult is it for other media professionals to distinguish between these?) McClelland isn’t obligated to fill her essay with any more context than is necessary to make sense of her own actions.

Ms. McClelland’s Haiti is not the Haiti we know. Indeed, we have all lived in relative peace and safety there.

The Afghanistan I know is not the Afghanistan many of my friends who have lived with more safeguards (and those who have lived with fewer) know. In fact, my Afghanistan –that is, the entirety of my experience in this country up to this moment– is known only to me.

Expats in places like Haiti and Afghanistan are not a uniform group. Some of us take more risks than others, live further outside the parameters of what is considered a sensible foreigner’s lifestyle and break more rules, both spoken and unspoken.

Those who live closer to the edge and those who do not stay long enough to experience the very real bursts of joy and love amidst the suffering, are struck more deeply by trauma. (McClelland definitely falls into the second category, and probably the first as well.)

When discussing the rampant, menacing sexual harassment on Kabul’s streets with other expats, I have actually been told that the problem is not serious, that I am being hypersensitive, that I am exaggerating and overreacting. The people who have said these things are, for the most part, people who do not walk alone, have not stood as frozen witnesses to men trying to drag a screaming woman into a car, have not been groped and cornered by Afghan men, do not have female Afghan friends and do not understand when a man shouts “Hey, foreign pussy!” at them in the local language.

But the women who responded to McClelland’s essay aren’t like that. They’ve lived in Haiti for years, even decades, a fact that makes statements like this even more baffling:

This does not mean that we are strangers to rape and sexual violence. We can identify with the difficulty of unwanted sexual advances that women of all colors may face in Haiti. And in the United States. And everywhere.

Now that is just college freshman bullshit. Again, I have to agree with Friedersdorf:

It isn’t fair to say that this paragraph is loaded with the pathologies of left-leaning political discourse. A journalist writing in The New York Review of Books or The Nation or The American Prospect would seek to correct alleged misinformation about the prevalence of rape in a country by providing the most accurate available statistics about the prevalence of rape there.

And this makes no sense whatsoever:

Unfortunately, most Haitian women are not offered escapes from the possibility of violence in the camps in the form of passports and tickets home to another country. For the thousands of displaced women around Port-au-Prince, the threat of rape is tragically high. But the image of Haiti that Ms. McClelland paints only contributes to their continued marginalization.

Actually, the image of Haiti McClelland paints, mostly in her reporting pieces for Mother Jones, is of a place where the threat of rape is tragically high for thousands of displaced women. It’s not at all clear what the authors are taking issue with here, besides McClelland receiving a great deal of attention while being a relatively new name in mainstream journalism and not a Haiti beat long-termer.

While we are glad that Ms. McClelland has achieved a sort of peace within, we would encourage her, next time, not to make Haiti a casualty of the process.

Oh, come on. Haiti has survived worse.

*

One day, when my time in Afghanistan is over, I intend to write about my life here. I do not intend to write a history of the Afghanistan war or a book about the intricacies of Afghan politics. Other people will write those books. Instead, I will write about the things that happened to me, the choices I made, the people I knew, and how my experiences affected me. Will it be self-indulgent? Absolutely. Because that’s what all personal writing –-including every male war correspondent memoir ever written– is.

I have male Afghan friends I trust with my life, but I have been cornered enough times by both strangers and personal acquaintances to fear the footfalls behind me and the grin of the average man on the street. I have learned to distrust before I trust. And when the time comes for me to write about my traumatic experiences with some Afghan men, I do not want to be told that I am marginalizing Afghan women, whining, or being racist.

Those of us who choose to go to work in places like Haiti and Afghanistan do just that –-we choose to work in extremely troubled places where we are outsiders. But the fact that we made that choice while others had it foisted on them at birth shouldn’t mean we aren’t allowed to write honestly and without shame or self-censorship about how we cope with the mental health issues that are among our occupational hazards.

*

And a few more points:

– Would we really be having this discussion if McClelland had turned to heroin instead of rough fucking to deal with her PTSD? I didn’t think so.

– Is anyone seriously arguing that journalists should be hounded out of the club if they write about themselves?

– “McClelland’s piece does nothing for Haitian women.” No, it doesn’t, and it’s not supposed to.

– The piece is titled “I’m Gonna Need You to Fight Me On This: How Violent Sex Helped Ease my PTSD,” NOT “I’m Gonna Need You to Fight Me On This: How I Eased my PTSD with Violent Sex and You Can Too!” It is not a how-to guide.

Post navigation

14 thoughts on “In defense of Mac McClelland (And the view from where I’m standing)”

So on point. It seems to me that we’re getting to a point where the West’s obsession with being PC causes many to blame the journalist for not writing an encyclopedia article to re-inform everyone on context EVERY time, instead of placing responsibility on the media consumer to do some research and not make conclusions from one article. And as you and others have pointed out, this wasn’t a straight up journalistic article about Haiti. It was a MEMOIR. Most male memoirs I have read get away with saying whatever they want about a place, with no regard for how context (or lack thereof) and the violent aspects they play up for sell-factor may affect the public’s view of that place. This happens all the time, and I dont see the public crashing down on them.. why, because they’re male? Why do they have more authority to show us the world through their own lenses without apology? Anyways, I understand where these 36 journalists were coming from, but they’re barking up the wrong tree and taking an easy shot instead of challenging ACTUAL REPORTS ON HAITI that have sensationalized Haiti’s dark sides since the earthquake (and before). Having standards in journalism is one thing, but if we’re allowing readers to be so lazy (or riddled with the guilt of privilege??) that a person’s brave individual memoir gets harpooned for not throwing in some fuzzy disclaimers about how not everyone in the country is a monster, then we allow them to ignore a responsibility to think for themselves. I’m sure if Haiti hadn’t been the issue here, another would have been raised simply because McClelland’s honesty made people uncomfortable.

I read Mac McClelland’s piece in the past couple of days and found it a brave, valuable, and personal account of PTSD. I found it really troubling that some people had such a fierce reaction, and I wouldn’t want her or any other sufferers to feel as a result that they shouldn’t discuss their experiences. Thanks for writing this defence.

@Mack – If this were a matter of political correctness, there would be Haitians and foreigners who’ve spent time in Haiti responding to the letter and saying she was accurate — that her opening depiction of Haiti may be ugly, as thekateblack says, but that it’s still the truth. That’s not happening. I have not seen one person from or who has spent time in Haiti saying that her portrayal was defensible by any metric, other than a blogger who says it’s unfair to call her out because she’s just one of countless reporters he doesn’t like. Have you? Real question.

If you believed her piece when you first read it, it would be comforting to think that its rejection is a PC conspiracy, or that the people who are criticizing the column even all get along and agree politically with one another. In other words, that everyone who says she is wrong is stupid, crazy, hateful and in cahoots. That’d be easy, wouldn’t it. I agree that everyone’s perspective is their own, but it must have occurred to someone here that “those who do not stay long enough to experience the very real bursts of joy and love amidst the suffering” may also not have stayed long enough to investigate rumors they initially accepted as fact, or even have asked questions about what they thought they had seen. One you’ve given up on arguing the facts, all anyone can do is discount the outright rejection of her depiction by a thus-far unanimous consensus of the only people in this debate who are not speculating by impugning their motives. Do you even know the work of the people whose opinions you’re dismissing? Because they know Mac’s.

From my end, I’ve tried a thought experiment. What if she honestly thinks she understood what was happening around her, honestly tried to empathize with the country she was visiting, and has given an honest accounting of her experiences there and since? Fresh eyes are great. People get inured to things quickly, and newcomers can show up, see things in a new way and reveal them to the jaded. But that’s only if they’re thorough, independent and fair. (Or maybe, as transitionland suggests, go places and brave barriers that they have not. Mac didn’t, just fyi.)

So here’s the thought experiment for the other side of the debate: What if the critics aren’t just assholes? What if they aren’t self-hating women, and have dealt with issues far darker, more complex and actually dangerous to write about than Mac’s piece? What if they know in far greater depth that Haiti is profoundly screwed up, and have declared so loudly, publicly and damningly to more people than our posts, blogs and essays about this will reach? In other words: What if you had to take them and their expertise seriously? What would you say then?

For all the polemic here, I am still grappling with the piece and open to new arguments about it. If you have one, please share.

And by the way, @transitionland – I don’t agree with it, but I like this post. You come off as a very good writer and empathetic. It sounds like you’ve done serious time in a very difficult place and I have no doubt your memoir will be an enlightening read. I understand your instinct, but I think you’ve identified with the wrong person in this fight.

The authors of the letter are certainly entitled to put forth depictions of Haiti that differ from McClelland’s, but what I take issue with are the following:

– The authors accuse McClelland of writing things she did not write. See: “heart-of-darkness dystopia,” “savage men consumed by their own lust,” and “danger encoded in a black republic’s DNA.” Those are the words of the 36 authors of the letter. They’re nowhere in McClelland’s writing.

– The authors write that “McClelland’s Haiti is not the Haiti we know,” yet they do do not dispute any of the facts in McClellands personal essay for GOOD or her reporting pieces for Mother Jones. (Puzzlingly given the Thought Police tone of the letter, they actually back up McClelland’s portrayal of Haiti as a place where sexual violence is a major threat to women who were left homeless after the earthquake.) This is the equivalent of saying: “My experience was not like your experience, and only my experience is legitimate.” I reject that.

– “We have all lived in relative peace and safety here.” That is a meaningless statement. The vast majority of all expats who have lived in Afghanistan over the past decade have lived in relative peace and safety (hell, so have I, overall), but that does not change the fact that most of Afghanistan is incredibly dangerous for both foreigners and Afghans.

– Again. Again. Again. McClelland’s essay in GOOD was a personal essay about PTSD, not a report on Haiti. If McClelland had developed PTSD covering the Deepwater Horizon disaster, or the war in the DRC, or the war in eastern Burma (she wrote a book about Burma, btw), she would have used that as the jumping off point for her story. The essay was about McClelland.

Look, the way I see it, everyone’s trying to have it two ways. The pro-Macs want it to have been a telling and descriptive essay set in Haiti, which talks briefly about her time in Haiti and then at length about the effects of her time in Haiti, yet claim when challenged that it’s not about Haiti at all. She’s a swashbuckling, ugly-truth-telling hero who went to this place and had these things happen to her and here’s how she got over them. Whether or not she faced danger and whether that ugly truth is true is immaterial. She’s just inherently swashbuckling and truth-telling.

The anti-Macs want to show her errors by explaining the deeply ingrained myths she is channeling — myths that she isn’t the 1,000th writer to channel in the last 18 months — by blankety refuting the facts as she laid them out. But then they don’t give you the facts to evaluate their claim, so you just have to take their word for their often vague statements. That’s annoying.

Ah, but that can’t stop us, can it? Mac’s GOOD essay contains no statistics (of course not, she’s writing a personal narrative, duh) but her subtly titled Mother Jones story, “Aftershocks: Welcome to Haiti’s Reconstruction Hell,” does. In it, Mac reports that rapes are up since the quake, then says:

“It’s a terrifying statement, considering that a survey taken before the earthquake estimated that there were more than 50 rapes a day just in Port-au-Prince, based on just the reported rapes—and more than half of the victims were minors. That’s how it’s been for as long as anyone can remember …”

Hell indeed.

Mais, bon. “Before the earthquake” can mean anything, but in fact Mac links her figures to a single study published in the Lancet in 2006, four years before the quake, which was based on data sampled in the capital over 22-months starting in March 2004. Why March 2004? Because March 2004 began the day after President Jean-Bertrand Aristide fled the country and factional violence erupted across the capital. “Since as long as anyone can remember” seems a bit off, since some people can probably remember before 2004 and certainly remember after. And how different was Port-au-Prince in March 2004 than September 2010? Well, how different was Berlin in 1945 from Berlin in 1951? But anyway.

So, baseline, “as long as anyone can remember” there have been at least 1,500 rapes a month. Over 10 months, more than 15,000 rapes. Before the quake!

Just before Mac’s story, Amnesty International put out its report: “HAITI: SEXUAL VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN INCREASING.” Their estimated, Haitian-run NGO-counted toll: 250 in the first 150 days after the disaster! Wow! Wow … wait. 250 in the first 150 days, that’s 1.6 a day. Well what about the Haitian National Police? In October, 10 months after the quake and including the two weeks Mac was there, the HNP reported 280, according to the UNOSG. That’s 0.92 rapes a day. (0.92 < 50)

The police are almost definitely under-reporting though. I mean, first of all they're a bad police force (they are). And maybe even Amnesty is off. I mean, how could it have possibly gone from 50 rapes a day then, uh, most of a decade went by and then the quake and it increased … all the way to 1.6 rapes a day (in a period half a year before she got there). Or, um, 0.92 in the period where she was. Officially. Obviously we need to go back to the Lancet study, which found 35,000 rapes over 22 months and … oh crap:

"A women's rights group in Haiti has also protested to the Lancet that the findings run counter to all the evidence they have received from rape victims. 'We have seen around 1,000 cases of rape,' said Anne Sosin, of Haiti Rights Vision." (The Guardian, Friday 8 September 2006.) (1,000 < 35,000)

(By the way, in New York City in 2008, there were 890 rapes, a rate of 2.43 a day, according to the most recent numbers from the New York City Alliance against sexual assault. Adjusting for size, New York would have a likely undercounted 0.57 per day vs. P-au-P's undercounted 0.92.)

One rape is too many. 0.92 rapes is too many. But there's this crazy branch of journalism that is fairly convinced that facts, you know, matter. Now does anyone REALLY know? No. But did Mac? No! Did clue you into any of this? Non. Why does that matter? Well, some reporters, before they went around talking about "hornets' nests of sexual violence" (sourced to a women's organization and a French police unit whose member she was dating) or "gang-raping monsters" prowling the yada yada, they might check out their subject matter. Or at least source it better. Or print the dispute, using the best numbers available at the time. (A statistical dispute with one, maybe discredited, side claiming a number 54 times bigger than the, possibly equally discredited, police are reporting seems worth mentioning.)

But not Mac. Maybe that story must not have been about Haiti either.

What does all this mean? Nothing, if you don't care if what you're reading is reported thoroughly and fairly. But what if, just … what if … Mac's work is laden with such gross exaggerations, cherry-picking the worst possible spins on every issue, twisting and twisting to make things more dramatic or even, benefit of the doubt, line up mentally with the trauma she's seen but failed to contextualize. Why would she do that? And what would that do to the ugly truth of her account?

Simply put, I am glad you wrote this. One of my first thoughts was to ask you of your reaction to the piece, but I resisted asking for fear of making a leap of assumption or intimating the wrong idea. While reading the piece made me terribly uncomfortable, taking that feeling and then assessing the work by McClelland as wrong or inappropriate would have been hypocritical. Thank you for writing this and sharing. I completely agree with the points you make.

I have said before that I love your personal writing. So, whenever that memoir of yours comes out, you can count me as one of the first in line to buy it.

As for your implication that people who identify with Haiti somehow have more “right” to say something about it – here’s some information: There are not only distortions from “too little knowledge” but also from “over-identification”. That’s one reason why it’s so important to differentiate actual content from mere attributions.

And last: The “high rape incidents” you contested as “myths” were actually cited in the same co-signed letter a little further down when claiming to speak for maginalized women in the tent cities where “threat of rape is tragically high” – thereby painting the very same picture they criticized McClellan for. Why is that OK when they do, but isn’t when she does?

Roxana Gay certainly clears the hurdle of someone who has spent time in Haiti and I appreciated her essay, before her I hadn’t seen that perspective. I thought it was precisely the balanced attempt at empathy and insight that Mac McClelland has really never exhibited in her reporting. However by Roxanne’s own admission, she doesn’t, “know if I get Haiti right because I only know Haiti as a Haitian American who goes to Haiti and sees the best parts up close and the worst parts from a safe distance. This means I know very little.” She then weirdly calls several black Haitians racist against people of African descent.

As for me, I’d say I don’t know if I get Haiti because I only knew Haiti as an foreigner who was constantly working, and whose job it was to dig into news stories in granular detail and constantly see the absolute worst parts of everything up close. (Normally I’m on the other end of “stop saying bad things about Haiti” diatribes, in fact, so I know how to evaluate them.) I don’t know if anyone gets any country, Haiti in particular, which I think was part of transitionland’s point as well.

To that end I never used the word “right,” as you suggested. Everyone has a right to contribute to the conversation. But it’s absurd to assume that knowing more about a subject somehow makes you LESS qualified to give an opinion. For those who know nothing about a situation to then give the benefit of the doubt to a neophyte while discounting the perspective of dozens of experts because you think they might be too close to the story is … crazy.

On your last point: Amnesty International and the Haitian police establish the rate of rapes in Haiti during the period immediately following the earthquake (150 days and 10 months respectively) at roughly one per day. Adjusting for population their calculations are about 40 percent more than the most recent figures from New York and about 30 percent less than the most recent stats from Washington, DC. Are you comfortable calling any of those three rates acceptable? If you were one of the 36 women who signed the letter, would you have written, “One person getting raped every day was awesome! We fully support rape.”

Yet Mac McClelland overstated the incidence of rape in Haiti by FIVE THOUSAND PERCENT. It’s the difference between “I think too many people have gotten E. coli poisoning this year in Europe” and “Europe is full of E. coli. It is an ugly land full of E. coli. 500 million Europeans died this year of E. coli. Don’t go to Europe, ever.”

To answer your question though, I do think that letter would have been better with stronger statistics. Frankly I don’t know if the letter writers looked into the Amnesty or HNP reports.

@jonathan: Glad the link to Roxana Gay’s essay provided you with a broader perspective. As to your statement that her assumption black Haitians, too, might hold racist ideas against blacks was absurd: Why? Do you really believe blacks cannot hold racist stereotypes against “people of African descent”? Maybe because of some sort of immunity you suppose victims of stereotyping have to biased perceptions about themselves? If so, please read up on psychology and sociology before judging. Here some terms you might want to look up: labeling theory, cognitive bias, self-perceptions after abuse, Stockholm syndrome, self-fulfilling prophecies…). Or, if you are more interested in ways this might be working in Haitian society today, why not brush up on the concept of “marronage”?

And yes, you didn’t use the word “right”, you just pointed again and again to “Haitian” sources as if a Haitian passport was all it needed to make you an expert. Haitians (living in Haiti) have expertise because of two REASONS: First, their greater knowledge of a situation they live every day and have lived for a long time (a knowledge which will of course be more profound in their personal settings, but may be narrower in scope than that of a professional journalist being able to travel around and getting to know a range of different perspectives, which many Haitians don’t have access to, and others simply don’t do for various reasons), and secondly because of their greater investment in the outcome of any change or non-change to the situation. My point was that this can also be the source of bias.

I can’t help but notice that you misunderstood this point about possible bias from people who over-identify with Haiti as me criticizing expertise, which you then dismissed as “crazy”. So I repeat: My point was that the co-signers’ perceiving McClellan’s piece as a slight to Haiti may also stem from their past experiences of Haiti being put down and them loving Haiti, and maybe more so than from the actual content of McClellan’s piece. This was expressed in Roxana Gay’s essay, too, by the way – and there actually is quite a lot of evidence for this happening here in the co-signers’ letter itself.

As for my last argument: It wasn’t about juggling statistics (which McClellan didn’t even mention in the incriminated piece yet you keep returning to), but about hypocrisy. So, again: How do you justify the co-signers’ accusing somebody of incorrectly painting a bleak picture of Haiti when painting the very same picture themselves?

And one last remark on the three explicit claims to your own expertise you made in your reply (admittedly after a vague introductory statement about maybe still not “getting” Haiti) while repeatedly pointing out McClellan’s (and Gay’s, for that matter) supposed lack of expertise: For someone “whose job it was to dig into news stories in granular detail” and who knows “how to evaluate them” (i.e. claiming to be an expert on analyzing news stories) you’ve done a remarkably high amount of misunderstanding here. Might the reason for this be your other claim to expertise on Haiti itself (i.e. as someone “whose job it was […] to constantly see the absolute worst parts of everything up close”)? And might this claim be driving you to over-identify with the co-signers’ position here, which, in this respect, looks rather similar?

@The Week As We Read It | Canonball: Yes, self-censorship among journalists and our reactions to independent thought are certainly interesting aspects in the debate about McClellan’s piece. One thing I’ve been missing in this debate, though, are our attitudes when confronted with extreme behavior: Don’t you think much of the outcry about McClellan’s piece stems from the self-harm she deemed necessary to inflict upon herself in order to cope with trauma? This reminds me very much of people’s reactions to borderline patients’ cutting themselves to cope with feelings of loosing a sense of self (a parallel instance of “inflicting self-harm with the intention to heal”). Often, to control their own feelings of terror and helplessness and in order to avoid being reminded of the fragility of the human psyche, people lash out against the patients. These feelings also keep popping up in medical staff’s clinical supervisions, again and again. I think, this might explain the outright brutality of some of the attacks, as well as the constant bashing her “for things she did not even write” – after all, you can hardly beat her up for being so desperate, can you? Although it simply scares the shit out of you?